Benjamin Thompson & John L Watts 
Political Society in Later Medieval England 
A Festschrift for Christine Carpenter

Essays on the connections between politics and society in the middle ages, showing their interdependence.


Christine Carpenter’s influential work on late-medieval English society aspires to encompass a wide spectrum of human experience. Her vision of ‘total’ history embeds the study of politics in a multi-dimensional social frameworkwhich ranges from mentalities and ideology to economy and geography. This collection of essays celebrates Professor Carpenter’s achievement by drawing attention to the social underpinning of political culture; the articles reflectthe range of her interests, chronologically from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, and thematically from ideology and culture, through government and its officials, the nobility, gentry and yeomanry, the law and the church, to local society. The connection between centre and locality pervades the volume, as does the interplay of the ideological and cultural with the practical and material. The essays highlight both how ideas were moulded in political debate and action, and how their roots sprang from social pressures and interests. It also emphasises the wider cultural aspects of topics too-easily conceived as local and material.


BENJAMIN THOMPSON is Fellow and Tutor in History at Somerville College, Oxford; JOHN WATTS is Professor of Later Medieval History at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.


Contributors: Jackson Armstrong, Caroline Burt, Tony Moore, Richard Partington, Ted Powell, Andrea Ruddick, Andrew Spencer, Benjamin Thompson, John Watts, Theron Westervelt, Jenny Wormald.

Table of Content

Introduction – John L Watts – Helen Castor – Catherine Holmes – Rosamond Mc Kitterick – John Morrill – Zara Steiner

‘If I do you wrong, who will do you right?’. Justice and Politics During the Personal Rule of Henry III – Tony K. Moore

The Coronation Oath in English Politics, 1272-1399 – Andrew Spencer

Local Government in Warwickshire and Worcestershire under Edward II – Caroline Burt

The Nature of Noble Service to Edward III – Richard J Partington

Local Politics and Ecclesiastical Patronage in Gentry Letters – Andrea Ruddick

Locality and Ecclesiastical Polity: the Late Medieval Church between Duality and Integration – Benjamin Thompson

Concepts of Kinship in Lancastrian Westmorland – Jackson Webster Armstrong

Body Politic and Body Corporate in the Fifteenth Century: the Case of the Duchy of Lancaster – Edward Powell

Manifestoes for Rebellion in Late Fifteenth-Century England – Theron Westervelt

‘New Men’, ‘New Learning’ and ‘New Monarchy’: Personnel and Policy in Royal Government, 1461-1529 – John L Watts

How Different it was in Scotland: Three Earls, a Football and a Ghost Story – Jenny Wormald

Christine Carpenter: List of publications

Index

Tabula Gratulatoria

About the author

Andrew M. Spencer is an Affiliated Lecturer in Medieval History at Cambridge University and Fellow and Senior Tutor of Gonville and Caius College. He is a historian of politics and the constitution of England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and has written extensively on the constitutional, political, military and social role of the nobility in particular.